Rebecca Winters - Christmas At His Chateau

Signals in the area could be patchy, especially near the castle. He checked the display on his phone. One minuscule bar of signal, but maybe that was enough. He tried dialling the estate office, just in case anyone was still there. His phone beeped at him. Call failed. The signal indicator on his phone was now a cross instead of any bars. Damn.

‘No signal,’ he said to Faith. It seemed these thick stone walls could withstand any means of escape.

She jumped up onto the table again. ‘Here. Pass it to me.’

Silently he handed his phone over, and she held it up to the window and pressed a button to redial. He held his breath, but a few moments later she shook her head and handed the phone back to him.

‘Try sending a text. I’ve worked in plenty of old buildings, including basements, and sometimes I can get texts even if I can’t receive calls.’

He nodded and tapped in a message to Shirley. She always kept her phone in her pocket. In a home like his, sometimes shouting up the stairs wasn’t enough. Mobiles were usually pretty reliable—but obviously not when most of the room was underground and surrounded by water.

An icon appeared, telling him it was sending, but a minute later his phone was still chugging away. The blasted thing wouldn’t go.

He put the handset up near the window, balancing it on the frame. ‘Better chance of getting a signal,’ he said. ‘Now we just need to wait.’

He stole a look at her. Her mask of composure was back in place. No one would guess that moments ago she’d been flushed and breathless, lips slightly parted… It was as if that moment on top of the table had never happened.

Right there. That was why his warning bells rang—why he shouldn’t think about kissing her. It had nothing to do with her nationality or her background, and everything to do with Faith herself.

The woman who lived behind those high walls of hers—Technicolor Faith—would be very easy to fall for. He felt he’d always known her, had been waiting for her to stroll across his lawn and come crashing into his life. He could feel that familiar tug, that naïve, misguided urge to lay everything he had and everything he was at her feet.

But that ability of hers to disconnect, to detach herself emotionally, was what kept him backing off. At least Amanda had tried; Faith McKinnon would always be just a fingertip out of reach.

Coward.

He ignored the voice inside his head, knowing he was right. He wasn’t going to be that weak ever again. So he decided he needed to do something to fill the rest of the time rather than just stand close to her, staring at her.

Conversation would be good. It would stop him thinking about doing other things with his lips. But Faith had already resisted his attempt to talk about her family, so he needed another subject. Thankfully, he knew her favourite one. If he could get her talking about the window the hour would fly by.

‘You believe Samuel Crowbridge made the window, don’t you?’ he asked.

She trapped her bottom lip under her teeth and then let it slide slowly out again, exhaling hard, as if she didn’t quite want to say what she was about to say. Marcus tried not to watch, tried not to imagine what it would feel like if it were not her teeth but his lips…

‘Yes…yes. I do,’ she said, and that light he’d been both dreading and waiting for crept into her eyes. ‘But believing isn’t enough. I need solid proof.’

‘For yourself? Or for others?’

She looked perplexed. ‘Both. You can’t put stock in dreams and wishes, can you? At some point you have to have hard evidence.’

Marcus frowned. ‘Sometimes one doesn’t have that luxury,’ he said, his tone bare. ‘Sometimes you just have to do without.’

That was what he’d done after his father’s death. No one had really known the truth of what had happened. He’d tried very hard to believe what people had said—that it had just been an accident—but the collapse of the family firm had started him questioning everything about his father, and he hadn’t been able to shake the cynical little voice inside his head.

‘Of course hard evidence is preferable, but it’s not always there. Sometimes you just have to take a leap and hope you’re jumping in the right direction,’ he added.

Faith gave him a weary look. ‘Unfortunately the academic community don’t share your faith in gut instincts.’

‘Have you found anything more about the other painting? Hope, wasn’t it?’

She shook her head. ‘Not much. The family who own it aren’t ones for sharing. I can’t even find a picture of it. They also own any sketches and documents pertaining to the original commission, so it’s unlikely I’ll get any confirmation from that source.’ She opened the rolltop of an old bureau that had previously been blocked by a hatstand, and coughed as the dust flew into the air. ‘That’s why finding something here at Hadsborough is so important. It could be my only chance.’

As she searched a small smile curved her lips. He instinctively knew she was thinking about something that amused her.

‘What?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘A goofy coincidence. It’s just that the names of the three paintings are almost a match for me and my two sisters.’

Marcus’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Faith, Hope and Charity?’

She walked towards him slowly. ‘No, my littlest sister would have gone nuts if that was the case. Mom switched Charity to Grace.’

‘What are the odds?’ he muttered. ‘Are you the oldest?’

She shook her head and leaned against the desk next to him. ‘Mom never was one for sticking to convention. I’m in the middle. We all used to complain about our names, of course. Can you imagine the teasing we got at school?’

He made a wry face. ‘I went to an all-boys boarding school. If that’s not an education in just how abominable children can be, I don’t know what is.’

She nodded in sympathy. ‘Grace complains the most, even though I think she’s got the best end of the deal.’ She gave him a devilish little grin. ‘But when we were younger Hope and I had a way of shutting her up.’

‘Oh, yes?’

She nodded, then smiled to herself at the memory. ‘We used to tease her that Gram had talked Mom out of calling her Chastity, so she could have had it a whole lot worse!’

He couldn’t help laughing, and she grinned back at him before hopping up and sitting at the other end of the table. They weren’t touching. Quite.

She’d forgotten to put those barriers back down, hadn’t she? Even though they’d veered off the subject of the window and onto something more personal. He should say something to kill this moment, move away…

But he didn’t. Just a few more seconds to find out what really lay beneath Faith’s high walls. The chance might not come again, and he’d be safe once she retreated behind them once more. She always did.

‘It sounds as if you’re close,’ he said.

Faith’s smile disappeared. ‘Not really. Not any more. It all changed after…’

He shifted so his body faced hers more fully. ‘After what?’

‘You don’t want to know. It’s too…’ She shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘Your family…they’re so different to mine.’

He guessed she was talking about somebody having misbehaved. ‘You’d be surprised what the rich and powerful get up to just because they can,’ he said, a dry tone to his voice. ‘The second Duke was a bigamist, the third Duke had more illegitimate children than he could count and the fourth Duke lost Hadsborough in a drunken game of dice and won it back again the next night. And those are just the highlights. There are plenty more stories to tell about the Huntingtons.’

Faith shook her head, but she was smiling. ‘Not the same, and you know it. All those things make your family sound dashing and exciting. My family just makes people shake their heads and look sad.’